About Façade

When you want to create a website or blog, you basically have two options: either you sign up for an account with hosted services like Medium, Tumblr or Wordpress.com, or, if you’re a little more tech-savvy, you install an open-source CMS on your own webhosting-account. Both approaches have their downsides, which I will outline below.

Downsides to using a hosted service are the lack of customisation options. You can’t edit the code to make the system behave differently, and you’re often tied to a small selection of customisation-options and themes.

Installing a CMS on your own server gives you many more customisation options by installing plugins or editing the code yourself. But this freedom also has its downsides. Hosting software yourself brings with it the responsibilities of a system-administrator: you need to make sure the software stays up-to-date, install the latest security-patches, ensure compatibility when updating server-software, etc. Especially open-source software is (by its nature) vulnerable for hackers when you don’t install the latest updates regularly. Just Google for ‘Wordpress Vulnerabilities 2014’ and you’ll see that it is hard to make open source 100% safe, even for established projects like WP.

Hosting software yourself brings with it the responsibilities of a system-administrator.

To overcome the downsides of both hosted and self-hosted software, we need a combination of both, a best of both worlds. That’s the concept behind my software project Façade. It combines the flexibility of a self-hosted CMS with the security of a hosted platform. All typically vulnerable parts of a self-hosted CMS like user-management, database-handling and backups are left to hosted services, and the presentation resides on your own server. What’s more, you can even combine the best parts of several hosted platforms. They become ‘plugins’ of your own site.

With Façade you can create content using your favorite blogging /social-media platform, and display it on your own self-hosted website. Façade currently supports Medium, Tumblr, Ghost, Blogger and Evernote. Try it for yourself, and let me know what you think.